Fr Alex Swain

Beloved in Christ,

The experience of time is a bizarre phenomenon.

Every year that passes, my qualitative experience of time moves increasingly rapidly. In the blink of an eye, it’s November! How did that happen!?

I remember when, as a teenager, something 6 months off felt like an eternity. Something even a few weeks away may have felt interminable.

Now? I look at my calendar and think, “six months will be here before I know it!”

Part of this torrent of time is, undoubtedly, due to increased busyness.

I suspect many of us find ourselves in that torrent—either with work or school or jobs or raising families. It just seems like there is so much to do.

And while technology has allowed us to accomplish more in shorter amount of time, making us more efficient, it has also proliferated a many-headed-hydra of things which need doing in the vacuum.

And that is just the experience of time.

But what is time?

Unfortunately (or fortunately) a Daily Bread reflection cannot begin to break that question down.

But St. John’s letter to the seven churches in Asia, what we know as Revelation, engages with time today.

St. John greets the churches from “him who is and who was and who is to come.” This is emphasized a second time, and Christ is referred to as the “Alpha and Omega” and the “First and the Last.”

God is simultaneously outside of time and manifests and interacts with us within time.

The second person of the trinity, the Logos, the Son of God, incarnated and became a human.

This is one of the most profound and shocking truths of our God: that God sheds immortality for mortality, infinitude for finitude, eternity for temporality.

This is referred to as kenosis, which is Greek for self-emptying. The kenosis of Christ comes to us from Philippians 2:7 that Christ “emptied himself.”

As we move through time, let us be reminded that we move, ultimately, towards eternity. We move from temporality to eternity, from mortality to eternity—all because Jesus did the opposite for us.

What a wonder that is! And in the journey towards eternity, may we remember that the God we worship is the mind-bending, physics defying, miracle-making, God who creates and sustains all that is!

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Alex